Harrogate International Festivals has announced Peter James as the final Special Guest for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the "world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction" taking place 18-21 July.

Home Thoughts, from Abroad Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

But Ronnie Butler is dead! Florence Claybourne lives in an assisted-living home for the elderly and Florence, or Flo to her friends, has fallen. The hours tick by as she lies alone in her flat and thinks about events both in the distant past and the recent. Florence is ‘on probation’.

The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived, Variety Turns extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016.

Prayer Prayer, the church's banquet, Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world’ transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace…

Harvey Lee left school in Manchester armed with a poor school report and few qualifications, with a bleak future and little else but a passion for music. His new book Backstage Pass tells the story of his time in the music industry, before he later became a business leader for such illustrious companies as Virgin and Microsoft.

Dean Rhetoric’s Foundry Songs is my first foray into dystopian poetry, and this anthology certainly features all the hallmarks of the genre. The poems open inauspiciously, never on a bright spring day with crocuses sprouting. ‘Psalm of Bandages III’ begins: ‘It’s October and the trees are cancerous’, which is about as apocalyptic as it can get.

Like a man drifting in and out consciousness, Tristram Fane Saunders’ grip on poetic theme and direction is fevered, mediated by his own susceptibility to the surreal, or to alternative landscapes that shape what he sees. More intriguing still that he should prosecute his aim in a range of bravura formal approaches whose framework can never contain the arbitrary image-making of his thinking.

She tells her love while half asleep She tells her love while half asleep In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow. As snowdrops and crocuses force their tentative flame through the resistless ‘green fuse’ of biological purpose, and we marvel at their indefatig…

Snow We're brought to our senses, awake to the black and whiteness of world. Snow's sensational. It tastes of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold. Ball it between your palms to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak. Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech, gather its laundered linen in your arms. A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!

Winter solitude (tr. Robert Hass) Winter solitude — In a world of one colour the sound of wind. We could waste words reflecting upon a miserable, sodden season of ‘named’ storms, gusty winds and deluges. Or we could consider, instead, seventeenth century Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō’s, exquisite Haiku of a proper winter.

December 24th It is almost five. It is Heiligabend. The forecast shows snow cartwheeling over Saarland. The sun goes down on your cul-de-sac, on your parents’ small, well-tended garden. Your yard is swept. Your steps are gritted. Your mother’s broom rests in an apple tree’s elbow. She hurries outdoors at the very last minute to dead-head a rose.